This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. It’s Earth Day 1990, and Meryl Streep walks into a bar. She’s distraught about the state of the environment.

For most of the last decade, recycling felt like a stable habit. You sorted your bottles, flattened your cardboard, and dropped everything in the blue bin. The rules changed slowly, if at all. That ...